Josh Axelrod (2:57)
Two months ago, I was in a casino in Southern Washington state. Feeling ill, I'd driven down from Seattle, where I live now. A friend of mine was visiting Portland, Oregon, and so I'd driven down to see him, but I'd also brought along $10,000 in cash with me, because you never know. And I stopped in this casino on the way, gambled a little bit, and then went to Portland, hung out with him, spent the night. And now I was back in the casino and I was hungover and ill, in part because I was in a casino. And casinos are a little bit sad, and small casinos in impoverished rural areas are a little bit extra sad. And I was also concerned about my own gambling and my relationship to what I was doing at that moment. I used to play blackjack for a living. I was a card counter, which is card counting is a legitimate, mathematically valid method for winning at the casino game, a blackjack. And I used to do that for a living. And then my life took an unexpected course. And so I'm sitting at this table thinking about these things, and suddenly the man next to me is dealt a hand. He gets a 20. That's his hand, but it's not an ordinary 20. It's made up of two queens of hearts, queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts. And as soon as I saw that hand hit the table, I thought, maybe everything's going to be alright now. I used to count cards for a living. And I was taught to do that by a group of friends, mentors, who were some extraordinary people, very brilliant, very poised, prosperous, and. And sort of beautiful in a way. And they incorporated me into a blackjack team that they had been operating for some time and taught me how to go into casinos and win money. And my job was to go in and win and take the money out of the casino, which you take in cash. You take it and you stuff it into your pockets, you stuff it into money belts, you put it in your breast pocket of your shirt or jacket, and you walk out with it and you feel physically and enhanced when that happens, it's almost like a part of your body and you bring it back to your teammates. We share our winnings, and so you distribute a $5,000 strap here or a $10,000 strap there, and everybody gathers around ecstatic, and it's almost like they're feeding off your own flesh. And after earning my living that way for several years, I sold a book about the experience, a memoir, and I sat down to write it. But I thought that I should procrastinate first. And so I played, started playing a little bit of poker on the Internet, which is. Poker is like blackjack, that one can win if one acquires a certain skill set that I had never happened to acquire. So I was playing poker badly, and I managed to lose a couple thousand dollars. And I became upset that I had lost a couple thousand dollars. And so I proceeded to lose $10,000 out of anger. And that made me really furious. And I spent the next year sitting at the computer in a pathological stupor, just pressing this button, going broke. By the end of the year, I'd vaporized 50 grand. I was in debt. And I was surrounded not by these extraordinary mentors that I used to have around me, but by these other people who were strangers, whose last names I didn't even know, who had these haunted eyes and these woe begone expressions in a Gambler's Anonymous meeting. And I was suddenly peers with the exact sort of people that I used to pride myself and sort of feather my ego by regarding myself as the very opposite of. And that's how I finished my poker career. And sometime after that, I finished my book. It was published, and then I got a job. It was a freelance job, but still they paid me. They sent me a check every couple weeks, which I found off putting at first, until I learned that those are fungible as well. And I decided to close the door on gambling, blackjack, poker, it didn't matter what form. That part of my life was now over. I fell in love and I moved to Seattle to be with this woman. And, you know, Seattle is a different. Is a little bit different from New York, the city. It is a city where nobody is trying to accomplish anything. And so it was a good place for the state of mind that I was entering. I would simply walk and contemplate evergreen trees. Or on the rare occasions when it was a clear day, I could contemplate the mountains or the sound. And every day at a certain time, I was practicing a form of Buddhistic meditation. So I would sit for an hour in a state of equanimity. And one day, during the time that I usually reserve for equanimity, I wandered into a casino, because in Washington they have what they call mini casinos. These Small, independently operated places with low betting limits. And they have blackjack and a couple other games. And I knew from my card counting days that small, private, you know, independent operations are often sources of unusual value for card counters. They have special vulnerabilities in their games from time to time. They have some procedural errors or extravagances that can be beneficial. And so I was going around and I started playing a little bit of blackjack, and I won a little bit of money. And when you win a little bit of money, the next logical step is to win a large amount of money. And the amount of money I had in mind that would be good as a goal was $50,000, the money that I lost playing online poker. I should make myself whole. And this idea both thrilled me, but it gave me a little bit of trepidation, because when you're a skilled gambler, when you're a card counter or a competent poker or what have you, if you lose money, it's absolutely consistent with your own rational self interests to play that much harder and that much longer in an effort to win back what you have lost, because you will, the long run will be good to you. But if you're a pathological gambler or just a normal losing gambler, the worst idea you can possibly have is the idea that you must be made whole, because the whole will continue to grow. And this is the very source of the pathological spiral that had absorbed my entire identity just a couple of years earlier. So I was a little unsure of where I stood, but to be honest, But I started a play, and the one thing I was sure of was that the value of the play that I was putting down was not very high because I didn't have access to a large team bankroll, which is what you really need to make reasonable amounts of money at blackjack. With a small amount of capital, my personal money that I had, I was earning something equivalent, at least theoretically, to minimum wage in the casino. I was actually. I got a little bit lucky. So I. I want a bit more than that. And I was playing, and then my friend, old friend Todd, flew out to Portland, and I drove down to visit him. And I stopped in this casino on the way to check it out. It was a new place. It had just opened a couple months earlier, and they happened to have a shuffle that was imperfect. It was interesting. It didn't sufficiently randomize the cart. So I sat down and I attacked the shuffle. The first day I got there, lost a couple GS, which is normal swing in blackjack. Went to Portland, Oregon, and saw Todd. And, you know, we ordered a round of drinks. And he said, how are you doing? What have you been up to? And I said, well, you know, I'm good, You know, a little this little that. I've been playing a little bit of blackjack. And I could tell that this question was sort of forming in his. In his mind. And he was wondering. I knew he was wondering, you know, what blackjack, how, like, what does this mean and what context? Like with a team, with other people, are you on your own? And so I just preempted the entire thing. And I said, you know, on my own, bankroll, my own money, just a little bit of play. And he was silent. And I felt so angry at him and through him, at everybody else who he was representing, all my friends, the people who loved me, my mom and dad, all these people who I was, you know, I'd basically been keeping it pretty quiet, that I was playing a little cards on the side. And the thing is that there is a dark side and a light side in gambling, and I had thoroughly explored both sides. I knew the difference. But the difficult thing about advantage gambling or gambling with an edge is that the situations that emerge when you're doing that and the circumstances that come up and the stories that you come back with are so far out and extravagant and frankly incredible that. That if you admit to any vulnerability or any uncertainty about what it is that you are doing in a casino, nobody will believe you that you have an edge. They won't see you as this thing that you're representing yourself as. They will see you as the stone cold opposite of that. And so I didn't talk about it anymore. I ordered the next round. We drank the next day. I was hungover back in the casino. And the shuffle, as I say, was not random. It's what you call a sequenceable shuffle. And in a sequenceable shuffle, everything you see comes back to you again. It's essentially a shuffle where it is possible to identify with a reasonable degree of certainty the exact moment specific individual cards are going to appear. That's a little bit different from ordinary card counting. It's very cool. And this game had an additional feature, which is that besides just being an ordinary blackjack game, they had a side bet attached to the blackjack game called the lucky ladies. And the lucky lady side bet, you placed it right next to your blackjack bet. And if you were dealt a queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts, the bet would pay off at 100 to 1. And when I saw that, I knew immediately, this makes sense. What you want to do in this game is to sequence the ladies, sequence the queens of hearts. There are only six of them in the deck, but they're very, very valuable. And so for the previous day and a half, I'd been betting for queens of hearts, and I'd caught a few, but nothing had ever lined up in this way to win the jackpot. But I was. I was confident. I had a significant edge doing this. And suddenly, at this moment, the man next to me was actually dealt the hand of hands, queen of hearts on top of another queen of hearts. And what that means is that there's a good likelihood that those two cards are going to appear within reasonable proximity of each other again after the shuffle. And so I sequenced them. I burned an image into my head. Sequencing is a mnemonic technique, and you use visual mnemonics. You associate people from your life with each card and put them in a scene to remember the order. And so I burned this IM as the dealer was shuffling, I was alone in this small casino in a remote place. But I wasn't entirely alone, because in front of me, in my mind, were these images of the people that I used when sequencing, and they were all my old blackjack colleagues. So I saw these prosperous, astute, kind of brilliant people that I had always held in such awe floating past me. And I also. I was not alone in a literal sense, because next to me at the table was this other guy who'd been in the casino all morning. This was a Wednesday morning, for hours gambling. And he had that same glazed look that the people I used to sit across the table from at Gamblers Anonymous meetings had. And the dealer finished shuffling and started to deal. And I saw the cards come out that indicated the queens were, in theory, due. And I placed two bets, table maximum, at this place, it was $300 on two consecutive lucky lady squares. And sure enough, in the first round, one queen of heart was dealt on one of my bets, which had happened a number of times before. I'd never won anything from it, so I didn't get too excited. The dealer kept going around. And on the second round, on top of my queen of hearts, she put another queen of hearts. And then she stopped, and she looked at the table, and she called over the pit boss. And he came and he looked at the table. And what they eventually figured out was something I already knew, which is that 100 times a $300 wager pays $30,000. And around the time they figured that out. I absorbed the notion that I had in fact just won that amount. And in fact, in the turn of a single card on one hand had gone within crying distance of this $50,000 nut. I was trying to recover. Eventually, somewhat begrudgingly, they paid me, they cashed me out. I took every hundred dollar bill that they had in that casino. It was a small place. I also took every $50 bill and a lot of the 20s. And I took this wad and just stuffed it down my pants so that I was physically expanded in this weird protuberant way, sort of like in the old days. But I turned around and I wasn't in Las Vegas. I was in this toilet, this small place where there were 25 or 30 people all staring at me, customers of the casino, people who worked there. Word had gone around and everybody there knew exactly what I had just won. And they had seen me at the cashier, they knew I was getting paid in cash. And so I moved briskly for the exit and briskly across the parking lot. And I started the engine in my car, drove out, made a series of strategic U turns to ensure I wasn't being followed, and then got on the Interstate 5 north towards Seattle through the woods in the dark of night. It was 5pm but it's the Pacific Northwest, so. And I felt expanded in this way, as I said, but also I felt this tingling, this sense of paranoia verging on terror. And I kept looking back in the rear view mirror, examining the headlights in the distance, trying to intuit if any of the cars back there looked menacing. And I kept asking myself again and again, is everything going to be alright? Thank you.
